King’s kids’ private school and the Common Core

At this point, it’s fairly widely known that the head of New York State’s public education system sends his own children to a private Montessori school in North Greenbush.

State Education Commissioner John King has taken criticism from many of his opponents for sending his daughters to Woodland Hill Montessori, much of that ire stemming from an accusation that his kids aren’t subject to the same new Common Core learning standards and assessments the state has rolled out under his tenure.

King, though, has tried to debunk such criticisms. “Woodland Hill has been great for Common Core,” he told the Times Union earlier this week.

On Thursday, Susan Kambrich, the head of Woodland Hill, explained exactly how the Common Core factors into the teaching philosophy at the school.

The short answer: It doesn’t, exactly.

“When I looked at the pedagogical shifts that are part of the Common Core, it felt like we were already doing those things,” said Kambrich.

The school has made no adjustments to its teaching model or curriculum to account for the Common Core. Indeed, inside the school’s warmly lit, greenery-filled classrooms, students are already learning math by building visual representations of numeric values, delving into nonfiction reading, and drawing artistic representations of new vocabulary words to help discern their meanings — all in pursuit of building deeper knowledge, as the new state standards also call for.

“Montessori education lends itself very well to the initiatives of the Common Core,” Kambrich wrote in a letter to parents earlier this year.

Woodland Hill does participate in annual state standardized exams in English, math and science (like many schools, public and private, it did worse on the new exams this year), as well as the Iowa Tests, another series of standardized skills tests.

Formal assessments throughout the school year, however, are less likely in the Woodland Hill classroom, particularly in the younger grades.

“Our assessment is done very naturally,” said Kambrich. “As the kids get older, the assessments do get more formal.”

Kambrich explained that much of the way students learn at the school makes such assessments unnecessary. For example, if a student is using a puzzle to help learn geography skills and the puzzle pieces don’t fit together, it will be obvious that their answer was not correct.

“Woodland Hill recognizes that standardized tests do not adequately measure the full range of a student’s academic abilities,” the school’s website explains. “We use detailed evaluations along with narratives to measure a child’s progress.”